Colonial Taiwan

Reviews / Votes

"Drawing admirably from sources in Chinese, Japanese, and English, Colonial Taiwan charts exciting new scholarly waters. With its focus on how Taiwanese writers, caught between competing cultural authorities, struggled to reappropriate a local cultural space and search for selfhood from the 1920s through the end of the colonial period, Colonial Taiwan provides a deep and rigorous perspective on colonial period Taiwanese literature."
Karen Thornber, Harvard University


"By presenting a comprehensive picture of the literary scene from colonial Taiwan, the author of this book joins a troop of dedicated scholars in post-martial law Taiwan who delve into a previously suppressed area of knowledge with a sense of urgency and historical responsibility. In particular, Lin takes on the important task of deconstructing the 'patriot vs traitor' framework that has been frequently, if at times unwittingly, resorted to in appraising Taiwanese writers active in the Japanese era. She does so convincingly, by effectively foregrounding such salient characteristics of the era as multifaceted-ness, heterogeneity, and intensely negotiated self-identity. Also noteworthy is the way Lin avoids the prevalent scholarly propensity of scrutinizing literary texts for ideological registers of race, class, and gender. Rather, she views them first and foremost as products of creative imagination conceived within constantly shifting historical circumstances. As such, they provide excellent lenses through which to perceive the colonized Taiwanese subjects' widely varied, forever tortuous search for a stable sense of cultural belonging."
Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang, University of Texas, Austin


"Colonial Taiwan's depth and path breaking methodology make it a significant addition to the field. Lin has written a thorough history of the colonial Taiwanese literary establishment in the English language. It makes a refreshing, forceful addition to the literature."
Bert Scruggs, University of California, Irvine


"This extensive and admirable study is a must-have in libraries containing collections on East Asia. It also belongs on reading lists of courses dealing with Taiwan literature or colonial literature in Asia in general."

-Carsten Storm, Technische Universitaet Dresden, in International Journal of Taiwan Studies, Vol 2 (2019) p. 377-395


"Colonial Taiwan offers a richly researched and contextualized series of readings of Taiwanese writers writing in both vernacular Chinese and Japanese. [This] book provides a plethora of information and nuanced analyses that certainly deepens our understanding of the conundrum faced by Taiwanese writers and their negotiating of identities under Japanese colonial rule."
- Leo T. S. Ching, Duke University, in The Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2020, pp.501-505